Windows Phone 7

Nokia has inadvertently revealed what could be the first NFC-enabled Windows Phone, prematurely releasing a video of the upcoming Nokia Lumia 610 NFC. Confirming the new model to be a minor change from the already announced Lumia 610, the clip - since set to private but not before The Next Web could grab some details - also indicated that carrier Orange would be among the networks offering the phone.

Nokia has slashed its Lumia 900 Windows Phone flagship to free on AT&T, a temporary promotion to apologize to customers for a data connectivity glitch in early models. Described as "a gesture of goodwill" the discount - which will take the form of a $100 credit to an AT&T account for any existing Lumia 900 owner or any buyer between now and April 21 - effectively reduces the subsidized price of the handset to nothing.

The technology that drives the Kinect system for your Xbox 360 as well as your Windows PC will soon be coming to Windows Phone in miniature. Several sources (one of them drunk, the others said to be entirely reliable) have spoken with VR-Zone's Theo Valich about Kinect NUI (Natural User Interface) and its future with Windows Phone 8. This technology will be coming to Windows Phone 8 codename Apollo or one of its updates and will have the platform transformed in no time flat.

AT&T's Nokia Lumia 900 continues to climb the sales charts, not only holding the top two places for online sales at one big-name retailer, but seeing customer demand apparently increase. Released in a high-profile launch featuring Nicki Minaj at the weekend, the Lumia 900 promptly grabbed first and second places for smartphones at one of the biggest online stores. Over the past twenty-four hours, that sales success has only got better.

Nokia's coveted white Lumia 900 is headed to the UK on April 27, local retailers have announced, offering 4.3-inches of Windows Phones alongside its black and cyan siblings. The white variant will be a Phones 4u exclusive, it's confirmed, priced from free with a new, two-year agreement priced at £36 ($57) per month or above.

Forget the iPhone. We are hearing AT&T is pulling out all the stops, along with their checkbook, and will be spending around $150 million on the Nokia Lumia 900 ad campaign. If recent reports from AdAge are accurate, AT&T will be going above and beyond what they did with the iPhone and will be spending plenty of green this month for Lumia marketing.

AT&T's Nokia Lumia 900 may have launched on a holiday with patchy store opening, but online sales look to have hit the spot. Neither AT&T nor Nokia have given any specific sales figures so far, but the black and cyan versions of the Lumia 900 are currently occupying the first and second place in the cellphone best-sellers chart for at least one large online retailer.

A couple of days ago Nicki Minaj was singing about it; now the AT&T Nokia Lumia 900 is finally on sale. The first Windows Phone to pack LTE, and the first Nokia in the US for some time that we'd recommend actually considering, the new Lumia is the largest of its family to-date and packs a competitive $99.99 price tag, assuming you're content with a new, two-year agreement.

Over the last year Nokia's had something of a tumultuous time in the mobile industry. While still a power to be feared in the featurephone market, their lack of presence in the smartphone market has been keenly felt. With T-Mobile's Lumia 710 as a prelude, the Finnish giant makes a return in earnest with the Lumia 900 on AT&T's LTE network. Its features and design are immediately attractive, but perhaps more so is the price: just $99 on-contract, or free for new AT&T customers. Can a combination of great design, high-end features and price make a bold statement for Nokia? Let's find out.

RIM may have no intention of exiting the consumer market, despite its appalling recent quarter, but the consumer market itself looks like it's inescapably drifting away from BlackBerry. CEO Thorsten Heins is still apparently wedded to BlackBerry 10, the company's next-gen OS, suggesting during yesterday's financial release that RIM would consider licensing it out to rivals. However, insiders at the firm are growing increasingly outspoken, with calls that RIM should abandon the platform "experiment" and instead follow Nokia in leaping to Windows Phone and Microsoft's warm embrace.

The near-magical update for the Nokia Lumia 800, tipped to hugely increase battery life for the Windows Phone, has been officially released. The new firmware "shows significant improvements" in the Lumia 800's runtime, Nokia says, along with improvements to audio quality and some other tweaks. However, there's still no WiFi tethering, and not every Lumia 800 user will get the new firmware immediately.

Gadget bloggers tend to share a few key traits, and one of those is an inability to resist high-end hardware. Super-fast processors, hi-res screens and next generation features get our blood rising. But we sometimes get blinded by our desire for specs, and all too often we ignore the high price that these features come with. Let's take a step back and examine the need, or lack thereof, for some of the capabilities of the latest round of smartphones.